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A collection of 2,604 blog posts
Angers activates. That’s the quote a friend shared with Christina Morillo, and it stuck in her mind. So when she set out to find some stock photos for the side project she had started with her friend Stephanie Morillo, she recognized what she was feeling when she couldn’t find them: Anger. The project, Women of Color in Tech Chat, is a community for women of color and non-binary people of color in tech. The goal was to build a simple splash page. “When we went to build a website and we found
Productivity on its own can be a tough challenge for anyone, even if you work from the same space every day. And what if you’re jumping workspaces every week? Every day? Every couple hours? Digital nomads and remote workers have a very unique productivity puzzle to figure out. I’ve been fortunate enough to be working remotely full-time for nearly 6 months now, and my desk has sometimes changed every couple days — or even every couple hours! As I’ve gone from place to place, I’ve been jotting d
I believe you can learn something from everyone—as long as you’re listening. We’re always building on the legacy and lessons of those who have come before us. For marketers, this is quite a legacy indeed. Although the discipline of marketing only emerged in the 1900s, it builds on a foundation of sales, advertising, copywriting and relationship-building that is much older. Some of its wisest teachings are hundreds of years old. Some of its big lessons happened only months ago. And for every br
When I first started out in marketing, I didn’t quite predict that I’d be a part-time designer, too. Now, in 201, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s become obvious and even necessary for all of us marketers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms. Thankfully, we live in a wonderful world where anyone can make the jump from novice to inte
Ai Ching Goh didn’t know what kind of company she wanted to start. She just knew she wanted to stop having the “Monday blues.” So together with her husband, the experimental psychology student and former Procter & Gamble corporate exec founded Piktochart, a web app that helps non-designers tell visual stories through images and infographics. Today, Piktochart has grown from 4 people working in a small Penang-based warehouse to more than 50 people serving more than 5 million users. Naturally, t
You might’ve heard the advice that your call-to-action should have one job, your email subject line one job, your blog post one job. Focus, with online marketing, is key. Turns out focus has a wonderful effect on building a business and driving results. Gather Social, a digital agency based in Nottingham, UK, takes this focused approach with every new client they bring on. The single thing that Gather Social wants to achieve for you on social media is an impact to your bottom line revenue. A
The last 3 weeks have been challenging and emotional for everyone at Buffer. We made the hard decision to lay off 10 team members, 11% of the team. I’d like to share the full details of how we got here, and the way we have chosen to handle this situation to put Buffer in a healthier position. I believe most startup founders are, by nature, optimistic. We want to solve problems and we believe in going from nothing to something. The attitude of most successful founders is that something previousl
I consider myself a pretty lucky guy. I have the amazing privilege of speaking with social media managers from a variety of brands and industries around the world on a daily basis. Listening and learning about the projects they’re working on, their biggest challenges, and what their aspirations are on social media now and in the future has helped me tremendously along the way. But then it dawned on me — I’ve never taken the time to write any of this incredible information down to share with ot
GIFs are great. And they’re everywhere. We use them at Buffer in our customer service tweets, our emails, our Slack channel. We include GIFs in marketing emails and team announcements. Anywhere there’s a message; there’s the chance for a GIF. And what’s more, we’ve found GIFs get great results! GIFs in tweets are one of our top tips for more Twitter engagement. One of our most popular transactional emails we send to customers features a GIF. Want to know how to create GIFs yourself? And know
The CEO and founder of Clef is trying to get rid of passwords forever. But Brennen Byrne, better know simply as B, still found a few hundred extra hours to build Clef’s company handbook from scratch—even though the company is currently a team of 7. “We take building a company really seriously,” he told CultureLab. “Even as a small team, so much of what gets done at Clef isn’t me. It’s important to us to build a great company at the same time as a great product.” Clef provides secure two-facto
Follower count is often considered one of the vainest of vanity metrics. I can relate. I’ve had my fair share of ego tied to that golden number on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—one day I’ll point out my follower growth to a friend and the next I’ll feel all insecure about the number not being big enough. Still, despite the vanity, there is value in follower count. While it seems like a smug number to chase, followers have a proportional impact on how far and wide your message sprea
The transparent monthly reports from Buffer were one of my first introductions to the company, and I’ve loved them ever since. Before I joined the Buffer team, I waited like Christmas morning for a new report to come out so that I could take a peek behind-the-scenes into the way Buffer worked. Once I came on board, I eagerly anticipated each and every new report and the chance to share with and learn from the awesome folks who took time to read what we were up to. I’d love to get back on a reg
I was a bit nervous before writing this post because there are so many possible golden rules for social media managers. I wondered, how could I ever hone in on the most important ones? From golden rules like setting proper social media goals to truly understanding consumer behavior and implementing that into your marketing strategy, this post could have taken on a variety of shapes and forms. But then I realized, social media managers are in the market of verbs. Our entire careers are based o
There are few greater joys in a marketer’s life than experimenting with a new technique—and having it work like a charm. You feel like a cross between a scientist, an artist, and a magician, am I right? After doing a little celebrating, you officially add the tactic to your repertoire, update your dashboards, and then probably start searching for the next thing to try. And because you’re always looking forward, you might not notice that technique that worked so well when you first used it? We
Back in 1894 to 1929, before sound could be synchronized with video, silent movies were in their heyday. In silent films, the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards which contain a written indication of the plot or key dialogue. And if you scroll through your Facebook News Feed, you may notice that in some ways, we’re moving back to those days. Here’s a clip from a recent Tech Insider video: And a clip from Gary Vaynerchuk: You’ll notice that both th
At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels. To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media. We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of o
“Unconscious bias” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days. What does it actually mean? Who has it, and can we even fix it if we do? In this episode of Buffer CultureLab, I got the chance to chat with Natalie Johnson, who answers all our burning questions about bias. Natalie is an expert in unconscious bias, from analyzing potential bias in companies’ people processes to training employees and managers on how to manage and mitigate bias. As a former People Analyst at Google,
It’s been an exciting month at Buffer – Tons of fun social media initiatives, experiments, and thinking ahead on innovative ideas to continue to grow on all of our channels. Ideas like: * How can we best market our new Buffer CultureLab podcast? * What does our audience enjoy on Snapchat? How can we grow and stand out? * Are we spending too little or too much on social media advertising? What’s the ROI? These are a few of the awesome things that keep the experiments and learnings churning.
In five-and-a-half years of Buffer (wow!), we’ve been fortunate to cross many milestones — 3 million registered users, 90+ team members, and most recently, $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Along this journey, we’ve been grateful for the support of the community and for the chance to gather new learnings along each step of the way. Some of these lessons we gleaned easily — others we learned the hard way. We’ve discovered the value of masterminds, data, and customer research. We e
As marketers, writers and crafters, we spend hours on bringing our content ideas to life and after all that effort, want our content to be seen. Writing powerful social media copy to grab people’s eyes and win their hearts is a challenge, though. And often, when our content isn’t breaking through the noise we can fix it with a few slight edits and tweaks. Editing content and copy is a key part of the creative process but is often overlooked. In this post, I’d love to share 11 editing tips and
Whole Foods has gone all in on social media. In addition to its main Twitter account (boasting 4.83 million followers), there are hundreds of smaller ones run by individual stores. Many locations also have their own Facebook pages, with follower counts any marketer would be happy with. For example, Whole Foods Austin has more than 32,000 fans. Clearly, there isn’t a single department that “owns” social media at Whole Foods. It belongs to everyone: from the CEO, who blogs about the natural food
Want to make your business stand out on Instagram? Check out our complete guide to Instagram marketing and get the playbook that drives results for Instagram’s top profiles. Businesses have been using Instagram as a way to build their audience and connect with customers for a while now without too much insight on how their content is performing. But soon, they’ll be able to dive way beyond total likes and views. Instagram has officially announced the launch of its tools for business user
I can’t believe we’re on Episode 5 of the podcast! Every time we get together for Buffer CultureLab it is both fun and educational, and this week is no exception. On this episode Carolyn and I talk about Millennials at work, and then welcome Buffer investor Kanyi Maqubela, who is a partner at Collaborative Fund. It’s a very different kind of investment fund that looks beyond traditional investing criteria to think about things like creativity, values and culture. Language alert! Things get a l
This week in #bufferchat, we discussed and learned all about supporting accessibility on social media with the incredible insights and knowledge of the founders of #AXSChat: Neil Milliken, Debra Ruh and Antonio Santos! We touched on a broad range of interpretations of “accessibility”, including how to be accessible to those with physical or intellectual disabilities, the blind and visually impaired communities, those with invisible diseases, those who are different ages, those who speak differe
